Inhabitable Infrastructures

Author: CJ Lim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317312368
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Inhabitable Infrastructures: Science fiction or urban future?, the follow up to Food City and Smartcities and Eco-Warriors, from one of the world’s leading urban design and architectural thinkers, explores the potential of climate change-related multi-use infrastructures that address the fundamental human requirements to protect, to provide and to participate. The stimulus for the infrastructures derives from postulated scenarios and processes gleaned from science fiction and futurology as well as the current body of scientific knowledge regarding changing environmental impacts on cities. Science fiction is interdisciplinary by nature, aggregates the past and present, and evaluates both lay opinions and professional strategies in an attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. The research culminates in the creation of innovative multi-use infrastructures and integrated self-sustaining support systems that meet the challenges posed through climate change and overpopulation, and the reciprocal benefits of simultaneously addressing the threat and the shaping of cities. J. G. Ballard has written that the psychological realm of science fiction is most valuable in its predictive function, and in projecting emotions into the future. The knowledge from the book is widely transferable, constituting both solutions and speculative visions of future urban environments. The book is indispensable reading for professionals and students in the fields of urban design, architecture, engineering and environmental socio-politics.

Infrastructures and Social Complexity

Author: Penelope Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317224345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

Countering the Cloud

Author: Luke Munn
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000833976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
How do cables and data centers think? This book investigates how information infrastructures enact particular forms of knowledge. It juxtaposes the pervasive logics of speed, efficiency, and resilience with more communal and ecological ways of thinking and being, turning technical “solutions” back into open questions about what society wants and what infrastructures should do. Moving from data centers in Hong Kong to undersea cables in Singapore and server clusters in China, Munn combines rich empirical material with insights drawn from media and cultural studies, sociology, and philosophy. This critical analysis stresses that infrastructures are not just technical but deeply epistemological, privileging some actions and actors while sidelining others. This innovative exploration of the values and visions at the heart of our technologies will interest students, scholars, and researchers in the areas of communication studies, digital media, technology studies, sociology, philosophy of technology, information studies, and geography.

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability

Author: Robert Brinkmann
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031019490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 2585

Book Description
The field of sustainability continues to evolve as a discipline. The world is facing multiple sustainability challenges such as climate change, water depletion, ecosystem loss, and environmental racism. The Handbook of Sustainability will provide a comprehensive reference for the field that examines in depth the major themes within what are known as the three E’s of sustainability: environment, equity, and economics. These three themes will serve as the main organizing body of the work. In addition, the work will include sections on history and sustainability, major figures in the development of sustainability as a discipline, and important organizations that contributed or that continue to contribute to sustainability as a field. The work is explicitly global in scope as it considers the very different issues associated with sustainability in the global north and south

Unlocking the Future

Author: Luo Xiaoming
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000876489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
The book highlights the urban imagination in contemporary Chinese science fiction, in order to assess the capacity of Chinese society to conceive of the future. The author argues that ‘the future’ is a set of directional and normative ideas that forms the basis of the entire social mobilization mechanism in China, while the capacity to imagine the future is likely to be produced in response to the present challenges. By discussing the urban space, the reconstruction of time, the infrastructure, and concepts of the 'urban-rural' and civilization in contemporary Chinese science fiction, she demonstrates how contemporary Chinese sci-fi may offer potential solutions to ways of ‘unlocking’ the future. In addition, she also points out the limitations of Chinese society’s imaginative vision of the future. The book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students of modern Chinese literature, science fiction studies, urban studies, or cultural studies.

Design for Tomorrow—Volume 3

Author: Amaresh Chakrabarti
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811600848
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 915

Book Description
This book showcases cutting-edge research papers from the 8th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD 2021) written by eminent researchers from across the world on design processes, technologies, methods and tools, and their impact on innovation, for supporting design for a connected world. The theme of ICoRD‘21 has been “Design for Tomorrow”. The world as we know it in our times is increasingly becoming connected. In this interconnected world, design has to address new challenges of merging the cyber and the physical, the smart and the mundane, the technology and the human. As a result, there is an increasing need for strategizing and thinking about design for a better tomorrow. The theme for ICoRD’21 serves as a provocation for the design community to think about rapid changes in the near future to usher in a better tomorrow. The papers in this book explore these themes, and their key focus is design for tomorrow: how are products and their development be addressed for the immediate pressing needs within a connected world? The book will be of interest to researchers, professionals and entrepreneurs working in the areas on industrial design, manufacturing, consumer goods, and industrial management who are interested in the new and emerging methods and tools for design of new products, systems and services.

People, Personal Data and the Built Environment

Author: Holger Schnädelbach
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319708759
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
Personal data is increasingly important in our lives. We use personal data to quantify our behaviour, through health apps or for 'personal branding' and we are also increasingly forced to part with our data to access services. With the proliferation of embedded sensors, the built environment is playing a key role in this developing use of data, even though this remains relatively hidden. Buildings are sites for the capture of personal data. This data is used to adapt buildings to people's behaviour, and increasingly, organisations use this data to understand how buildings are occupied and how communities develop within them. A whole host of technical, practical, social and ethical challenges emerge from this still developing area across interior, architectural and urban design, and many open questions remain. This book makes a contribution to this on-going discourse by bringing together a community of researchers interested in personal informatics and the design of interactive buildings and environments. The book’s aim is to foster critical discussion about the future role of personal data in interactions with the built environment. People, Personal Data and the Built Environment is ideal for researchers and practitioners interested in Architecture, Computer Science and Human Building Interaction.

Hunch

Author: Berlage Instituut
Publisher: episode publishers
ISBN: 9789080536241
Category : Architecture, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description

Dreams + Disillusions

Author: CJ Lim
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429664761
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
Dreams + Disillusions explores the plethora of ideas and ideologies that have shaped and reshaped cities in profound ways. However, unlike a conventional title on the history of urbanism and architecture, its research fluctuates between the world of concrete reality and the multiple universes that exist in lucid prose, poetic visions, and the outrageous imaginations of history’s greatest and most (in)famous minds. In their thoughts are the foundations for political trends and new civilisations, alternative mappings and unlikely phenomena. The six chapters reveal dreams that were fundamental to the origin of great cities, underpinning the stories of the many lives within; and how, through circumstance or manipulation, fortunate coincidence or planned perfection, desires are sometimes left defeated and disillusioned. Myth and belief. Tradition and logic. Revolution and marginalisation. Ignorance and hubris. Sins and excess. Seasons and climate. Continuously interacting, shifting to enlighten and to enrage, these themes combine critical thinking with deep-rooted influences and new agencies that are a true sign of the times. The 18 illustrated speculations provide an abundance of curious imaginings, diverse provocations and satirical criticism. While there are distinctions between dreams and disillusions, could virtues be made of sins, or sensitivity be borne from hubris? Could progress advocate tradition, or should we re-attempt revolutions formerly experienced as disillusionments? Whether by bold gestures or by subtle attrition, cities are continually re-written crucibles for the human condition. In this book, we develop a better understanding of the discourse of cities tailored to the determining factors of climate, resources, and humanity’s idiosyncrasies to address a world in crisis.

The New Companion to Urban Design

Author: Tridib Banerjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351400614
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 894

Book Description
The New Companion to Urban Design continues the assemblage of rich and critical ideas about urban form and design that began with the Companion to Urban Design (Routledge, 2011). With chapters from a new set of contributors, this sequel offers a more comparative perspective representing multiple voices and perspectives from the Global South. The essays in this volume are organized in three parts: Part I: Comparative Urbanism; Part II: Challenges; and Part III: Opportunities. Each part contains distinct sections designed to address specific themes, and includes a list of annotated suggested further readings at the end of each chapter. Part I: Comparative Urbanism examines different variants of urbanism in the Global North and the Global South, produced by a new economic order characterized by the mobility of labor, capital, information, and technology. Part II: Challenges discusses some of the contemporary challenges that cities of the Global North and the Global South are facing and the possible role of urban design. This part discusses spatial claims and conflicts, challenges generated by urban informality, explosive growth or dramatic shrinkage of the urban settlement, gentrification and displacement, and mimesis, simulacra and lack of authenticity. Part III: Aspirations discusses some normative goals that urban design interventions aspire to bring about in cities of the Global North and the Global South. These include resilience and sustainability, health, conservation/restoration, justice, intelligence, access and mobility, and arts and culture. The New Companion to Urban Design is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students interested in cities and their built environment. It offers an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across a range of disciplines including urban design, planning, urban studies, and geography.